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What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?
- megadethz 9y agoCPU mines Monero not Bitcoin.
- mrtksn 9y agoWhy do I keep seeing this everywhere on the internet? There's no technical reason not to mine bitcoin on CPU.
- Karunamon 9y agoMost of the bitcoin network’s mining power is tied up in ASICs right now, and the difficulty has gone up to keep the block rate constant. A CPU just can’t keep up. There was a time when GPUs could, but now they can’t either. It’s technically possible, I mean nothing is stopping you from running mining code on your machine right now, but you would have little to no return on your electricity investment. Monero makes more sense. To put this in perspective, a modern desktop CPU will do anywhere from 10 to 20 megahashes per second. A single ASIC will do 4 terahashes and up. The single ASIC is getting so many more bites at the pie that you would literally never mine a single block. Every single simultaneous Salon user could leave their browser open and the ASIC would out-hash their combined compute power in the blink of an eye. The developer time they’re spending on implementing this scheme would be better allocated by buying ASICs themselves!
- snissn 9y agopractical reasons
- Viper007Bond 9y agoBecause even when you're not paying for electricity, there's much more profitable coins to mine.
- mrtksn 9y agoThat doesn't mean that CPU can't mine bitcoins.
- saagarjha 9y agoJust because you can doesn't mean you should. If you're not going to make money mining Bitcoin, then why do it?
- mrtksn 9y agoAre we mining Bitcoins here?
- lifeformed 9y agoYou can mine bitcoins using pen and paper too.
- JohnTHaller 9y agoThe electricity to do so costs far more than what you generate. And you'd generate almost nothing even leaving a page open all day.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoBut these leeches don't care about that. It's not their CPU power and battery power being wasted.
- Kiro 9y agoFrom the Coinhive website: > Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs. > There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser.
- Viper007Bond 9y agoYep, my CPU (i7-4790K @ 4.7 GHz) smokes my dual GTX 780s in hash rate for Monereo.
- hossbeast 9y agoOnly mathematical ones
- realusername 9y agoThe difficulty right now is way to high for a CPU to mine bitcoin.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 9y agoAnyone know the cost of the mining rig in comparison to the cost of power for running the mining rig? Seems like it would be easier for Salon to just buy their own mining rig but if the energy demands are extreme I can see why they would want to offload this to their readers. Seems convoluted but hey this is the internet.
- egypturnash 9y agoThis is not a way for Salon to mine crypto. This is a way for Salon to get a small amount of money from each of their readers, replacing the small amount of money they used to be able to get by serving some ads along with their articles. The equivalent action is not “Salon buys their own mining rig”. The equivalent action is “you and a bunch of other readers kick in a buck, and then Salon buys a mining rig”.
- pdkl95 9y agoThe increased use of browser mining has made it a lot easier to convince people to globally disable Javascript (or install noscript/etc). Security concerns are rarely convincing, and tracking can be hard to explain, but paying for more electricity and worse UI response time are things people actually care about.
- Kiro 9y ago> worse UI response time The miner is run in a WebWorker so shouldn't affect the UI response time.
- pdkl95 9y agoI never said it was the browser's UI. Regardless of which UI, you do not know people are using their computer for, or how much free CPU they have available. My friend's 1.2Ghz Core 2 Solo[1] laptop takes many seconds to reload locally hosted static HTML. Loading a youtube page takes >30s, sometimes far more. Anytime a webpage has CPU-bound Javascript - intentionally or not - the mouse becomes a lot harder to use. No, they are not buying a new laptop anytime soon; they live below the poverty line with student loans and medical expenses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microprocessors#%22Merom-L%22_%2865_nm%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microproc...
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago> The increased use of browser mining has made it a lot easier to convince people to globally disable Javascript (or install noscript/etc). Has it though? Do you have any data to back up this assumption? I can't find ANYONE who is tech illiterate who understands any of this stuff and those that I know are tech literate either don't notice or don't care about JavaScript. I've only ever met very, very few people who disable JavaScript and when they do it's always been piecemeal. I haven't been able to find any statistics regarding who does and doesn't disable JavaScript, their group size, etc. It would be really interesting to know!
- pdkl95 9y ago
- Overtonwindow 9y agoWow! Oddly I think this is totally acceptable but will eventually go way off the rails with abuse and ruin everything.
- dkarl 9y agoThis is everything I wanted from micropayments. Please, take my money rather than forcibly taking my attention and shoving garbage through my brain. Too bad it has to waste electricity, but at least it's not abusing my poor, finite, distractible, distortable brain. It's not precious to anyone else, but it's precious to me.
- perl4ever 9y agoIs it really everything you want? Because one thing that I can imagine wanting with micropayments is transparency about how much you are paying...
- dkarl 9y agoNot everything. But having this appear out of nowhere after years of waiting for micropayments for journalism is enough to make me gush like that.
- imron 9y agoCheck out brave and brave payments.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoYou can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.
- rumcajz 9y agoI recall we have once discussed this kind of payment for articles, but back-of-the-envelope calculation showed it would take ~170 hrs to mine one cent.
- snissn 9y ago> https://brominer.com/ https://brominer.com/ I'm mining 50 H/s https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingPower=50&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0&MiningPoolFee=1 https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingP... Estimates in 24 hours I will generate 4 cents of revenue.
- cstoner 9y agoIs that really much worse than what advertisers are paying? I'm only kind of kidding.
- dawnerd 9y agoI mean, if they're making close to zero because of adblocker, its better than nothing right?
- bradleybuda 9y agoA decent first effort at transparency, but there's one very obvious question missing from the FAQ: "Will my electricity bill go up or my laptop battery drain faster when I am participating?" Can't help but think they omitted this on purpose.
- jnordwick 9y agoI want my cut! I've been pushing this idea for over a year now (as my HN and other social media comment histories can attest), most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242816 I should have patented this when I first had it. Waiting for streaming music and video to embed mining in their players... Or websites pooling together to stabilizing income streams and provide bulk access. The idea to rent computer time to a publisher in exchange for content can be taken further.
- stevenh 9y agoCoinhive has been around for awhile.
- bdcravens 9y agoCoinhive made it more viable, but this doable as early as 2011: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0
- bdcravens 9y agoMining via Javascript happened back in 2011: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0
- zapt02 9y agoTerrible idea, and hubris on your part for thinking you can patent this "idea".
- ShirsenduK 9y agoI wrote about this model few days back. https://medium.com/@troysk/saving-journalism-with-cryptocurrencies-4db4bd15acc9 https://medium.com/@troysk/saving-journalism-with-cryptocurr...
- zapt02 9y agoIt's clear you've never worked at a newspaper. If one of the major publications tried this sort of hijinx the other papers would latch on and give them badwill to no end. This is not the way to "save journalism", and it's a truly terrible idea that will kill whatever serious publication dares try it. The CBS Showtime site you refer to as "HBO Showtime" in your article was likely hacked, so doesn't back up your point at all.
- romanovcode 9y agouBlock Origin is blocking browser-miners as well tho.
- foadsf 9y agomaybe this is a good idea for open source projects. they can ask their users to open a page and runs in the background with lower priority than users tasks. when the computer is idle they can mine crypto.
- Kiro 9y agoI don't understand the comments in this thread. You explicitly have to allow Salon to use your CPU so how is NoCoin, NoScript and other blockers relevant here at all? The only real argument against this is the environmental one, and it's a big one.
- TheAdamist 9y agoSalon needs to fix their malvertising redirect problem, seems more rampant there than anywhere else.
- cribbles 9y agoFor those unfamiliar, Salon.com is a new media company that publishes articles on current events from a left-leaning perspective - for example, "Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future" [1] [1] https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-c...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoHoly hell. This is the new best in terms of conflicting viewpoints in a single media outlet.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago> Salon.com is a new media company Salon was founded in 1995 (and its close analogue Slate a year later). I guess that "new media" can encompass anything that was primarily digital from the start, but it still feels weird to see that tag applied to something that has been around for over two decades now.
- pmontra 9y agoDoes mining work also in reader mode? Probably not. There is also NoCoin. Anyway, I rather lend them some CPU than get ads on my screen.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoI would rather do neither. My CPU, my bandwidth, I decide what runs. If they want money, they can put up a paywall.
- Kiro 9y ago> I decide what runs Exactly. No-one is forcing you. You are confusing this with sites starting the miner without consent.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoWhen sites are specifically proxying their miners, to act as if they're running in a first-party context, that is deceptive, and done specifically to get around adblockers and mining blockers. Make it 100% opt-in and tell people in no uncertain terms up front what they're signing up for, then maybe.
- iAMAGuest 9y ago> Make it 100% opt-in It seems to be 100% opt-in in the terms of either you select ads or mining, I am certain you probably mean you want to opt out of ads and mining.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoThat is not opt-in, that is a forced choice between two evils. I do not wish to be forced into an opt-out situation. It is opt-in or nothing. I will continue to block ads, miners and other malicious scripting. They can offer whichever ad or miner they want, and I will simply refuse and block all of them from appearing on my device in my browser to consume my battery power and my bandwidth. They are more than welcome to put up a paywall, either single payments or a subscription service, and I will pay for their content if it is appealing to me. They are also welcome to (attempt to) block me for using JS/ad blocking. It will either be completely ineffectual and easily circumvented, or it will make me go to other sites, that don't treat their customers as cash cows. I have absolutely no obligation to unknowingly fund other people's internet profiteering moonshots. If they want money, they can ask for it honestly and directly. I support several content creators on Patreon, and I regularly donate to various open source projects and the like. I don't mind paying for stuff, but I do mind when it doesn't happen openly and transparently.
- nikanj 9y agoIn the crypto money flow, I get to see the page for a $0,20 payment from me to my electricity company, but I'm still struggling to see the value transfer from the electricity company to Salon.com. Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can later pay someone else with the same "proof of wasted cpu cycles"? What?!
- ves 9y agoIt’s just proof that you didn’t forge a scarce commodity. The value isn’t related to the wasted electricity, but the hard problem the electricity was used to solve. Love it or hate it, it makes sense.
- natecavanaugh 9y agoThis is a really good point. And strangely, like so much wealth in our economies, this one has nothing physical backing it up, but is suited to something we crave. And in this case, trust seems to be the underlying commodity.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoBut does that hard problem actually do anything? If it was something like Folding@Home, I could see the value. It seems to me, the only “value” in this hard problem is to waste electricity.
- VonGallifrey 9y agoMining in Crypto Currencies is the process to Verify, Order, and Secure the transactions in the global ledger. Without mining no one could send transactions, without transactions the currency does not function. The hard problem that the mining algorithm computes is a Hash of a batch of transactions together with some meta data. This meta data also includes the Hash of the previous batch. This is creating a cryptographic chain of transaction batches (blocks). A Blockchain. This is securing the transactions in the following way: - You can not change a transaction without changing the hash of the batch the transaction was included in. - This would also change the hash of all transaction batches that follow. - The crypto currency miners and users follow the longest chain with the most work put into. - To fake or alter a Transaction you would need to recalculate the hashes of the blocks that follow faster then the honest miners so that your new chain is the longest chain. - More honest miners means it is harder to manipulate the blockchain since to do that you would need to control more then 51% of the global hash power of this currency. Securing a Blockchain is not as noble of an effort then curing cancer with Folding@Home, but it is also not just wasting electricity.
- PatchMonkey 9y agoAdblock Plus has a cryptominer list. Yes, it does work in ublock origin. Problem solved? I think so.
- stonogo 9y agouBlock Origin ships their own. It's under '3rd-party filters' as 'uBlock filters – Resource abuse'.
- seveibar 9y agoIt's pretty easy to proxy the request to a cryptocurrency miner pool through the web server of the main site. e.g. https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive-proxy https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive-proxy Site owners have incentive to run this proxy so they're not marked as a mining site OR to circumvent the X% fee that coinhive/other cryptocurrency pools collect. So the adblock/ublock origin fixes will only work until site owners decide to start proxying. IMO search providers should penalize sites with poor performance (as they already do) and site owners are penalized if they suck the consumers CPU. edit: Fixed last sentence
- stordoff 9y agoIs that not currently the case with ads, and addressed by blocking certain scripts/elements even if they originate from the same site? I'd also suspect that it'll just lead to different ways of detecting miners (e.g. fingerprinting the behaviour of mining algorithms, or just blocking scripts that use more than a set CPU budget by default).
- seveibar 9y agoDetecting a similar script should prevent the proxying from working, but if the script is bundled into the main JS of the site (as many sites do now) it would be basically impossible to stop w/o blocking JS altogether. Not sure if browsers can fingerprint script execution patterns, that's way further down than I go. Script blocking will probably work most of the time, just as blocking certain urls gets rid of most ads.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoIt seems that a browser should be built that offers X mining power while visiting site in exchange for no ads or trackers. Instead of malware, mining could be a way to free the web of all its privacy ills.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThis seem like a natural micropayment system that could free content producers from the need to rely on advertisments and tracking for income. That seems like a good thing, and a formalized method to do so within a browser could speed adoption.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoPaying for website access by needlessly wasting CPU power. Doesn't sound like a particularly good idea, especially for laptop users.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI understand this point. But on the other hand, it is not necessarily wasting cpu power. It is converting CPU power to payment for content, as a type of seamless micropayment, not requiring punching in credit card numbers, 3rd parties, setting up accounts etc. Some browser-based standardization of a unit of cycles per view might be established. I don't know, just exploring. The current state of the internet kind of sucks in terms of privacy.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoIt's wasting CPU/GPU cycles and battery power, vastly more than would be used for a simple micropayment with actual currency. I refuse to participate in the degradation of my devices' performance as "payment".
- SubiculumCode 9y agoMore than the current system of loading thousands of ad networks?
- Nursie 9y agoGreat, more sites that will make my laptop sound like an aircraft taking off. Just nope. If you want to block me from accessing your content with an adblocker active, go for it. But you aren't using my machine like this. Without explicit agreement I wonder if it's even legal.
- AstralStorm 9y agoIt is as legal as any silly website eating all your CPU. Time to fix JS engines to prevent such abuse. Make them a real virtual machines while at it not sombre half baked efforts - that would also help with security holes.
- dawnerd 9y agoI would love it if browsers detected spikes in cpu usage and ask if you want to end the script, similar to when a page stops responding/locks up.
- cimmanom 9y agoFirefox does do that.
- gesman 9y agoWould be interesting to pull their destination bitcoin address and see stats of how many nano-bitcoins they've mined so far.
- omgbananas 9y agoThey're not mining Bitcoin, they're mining Monero, and a key property of Monero that makes it a currency is that you can't tell how much someone has.
- ZealotCrushCoin 9y agoZealots rule cryptocurrency thread moderation with an iron fist
- Arn_Thor 9y agoThe last two paragraphs is where it gets sleazy. They're saying you'll "help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies" (a.k.a. paying Salon from your electricity bill), but then allude to the fact that this technology COULD, theoretically, maybe, be used for all sorts of good stuff. Never mind that what it's actually going to be used for is, again, paying Salon. I approve of their transparency, and I don't have a rational complaint against the method of revenue generation at the moment, but the last part there is an attempt to put lipstick on the pig
- bencollier49 9y agoThis again falls under the heading of "environmental disaster".
- rspeer 9y agoIt blows my mind that the first site to openly make their users participate in this disaster is the supposedly "progressive" Salon. Is it clear what they're trying to mine? They have these silly feel-good examples like folding@home but it sounds more like they're going to be moving drug money for anarcho-capitalists like everyone else in this space. Probably Monero, right?
- bencollier49 9y agoThat one makes the most sense, given that it'll be CPU mining.
- johnpowell 9y agoI actually wouldn't mind if someone made a application that would run on my computer and mine for sites I choose 24/7. Something easy like Minergate or Nicehash but where you say mine for Metafilter, Reddit, and Ars. I would totally do that since it is 26ºF right now and I am actually mining a shitcoin to heat my apartment. But you would need to have a easy to set a limit like 10% and back off (nice -19) so if I was doing heavy stuff it would throttle. edit :: and I know minergate steals hashes. But the software is really nice.
- hartator 9y ago> complex math problems that form the integrity of blockchains There is no complex math problems being solved, it’s litteraly additions. I gringe my teeth everytime I hear that.
- stevewillows 9y agoFor me, this calls back to a need for micro-transactions much like Flattr, but for all sites. Set your own category budget (e.g. $10/m for 'news'), and then the extension keeps tabs on the sites you visit and the categories they fall under. At the end of the month, the budget is divided up equally. It doesn't sound like a lot, but even a dime or two per person adds up to more than these companies are seeing from the adblockers.
- imron 9y agoCheck out the brave browser and its payment settings.
- stevewillows 9y agoyes! that's along the lines I was thinking. On the surface its such a simple idea, but it doesn't seem to be widespread. I also like that it takes into account time spent on the site, but not as the sole metric. In my view, this will be part of the future of a somewhat ad-free internet.
- Traubenfuchs 9y agoI am not interested. I just installed the noCoin filter in uBlock. For all I care your service either 1) provides free content 2) provides content that's so irreplaceable that I will pay for it 3) dies
- whywhywhywhy 9y agoThink it's interesting how angry website miners make people vs just a banner ad also consuming your entire CPU. Definitely feel it has an element of Bitcoin FOMO to it. The idea someone used their CPU could get rich off it angers people more than just a badly coded ad using the same amount of CPU. (Not saying the anger isn't justified, purely an observation when really the power wastage is the same)
- johmac00 9y agoAre they mining monero? Seems like it w/ CPU usage and apparently being profitable
- carlesfe 9y agoThis may be the first step towards a new W3C standard: CPU-as-a-payment. If browsers and sites could agree on a shared spec, it would provide great UX, with fine grained permissions, promoting well behaving websites while rate limiting others.
- kazinator 9y agoSoon, there will be CPU blockers to counter this; site sees you have an ad blocker so it uses your CPU; browser's counter-measure notices CPU being used for crypto-currency mining or whatever else, and throttles those threads down to a trickle. "We have noticed that processing in your browser is suspiciously slow; are you using a CPU blocker? ..."
- kristianp 9y agoThis is a cool twist on the hashcash idea, where Salon gets paid when you do a proof-of-work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash